Spare no resources to ensure varsities teach, innovate and conduct research

Whenever lawyers talk about Caesar’s wife – to illustrate why certain individuals should, of necessity, be as white as cotton wool, to borrow from Kenyan political lingo – what comes to mind is the institution called the university. Universities should epitomise managerial, administrative and governance excellence.

They should be the campus of prudent management practices and innovation, adept at detecting institutional failure and nipping it in the bud as a routine matter. They should naturally exemplify the principles of meritocracy, fairness and democratic governance. These institutions should ooze greatness. Otherwise, why should we trust them to produce good managers, conscientious leaders, astute engineers, bankable doctors and pilots, and all the other professionals they are tasked with training?

Perhaps I hold an old-fashioned view of universities. I attended university when an admission letter to a public university was akin to an invitation to the high table of the social crème de la crème. Once the rumour started circulating that you had passed and were about to join campus, you underwent a transformation of sorts. The local secondary school wanted you to teach as an untrained teacher because they lacked staff for English, Physics, or Commerce.

Others worked as lab assistants or librarians during the year before college. All of a sudden, we boys and girls became a magnet for attention. I recall that a couple of the forms you had to fill out required signatures from the District Officer and the chief, with whom you were soon on a first-name basis. Some people I know were so overwhelmed by this change in status that their walking styles changed!

This reverence wasn’t just because there were only a handful of universities in Kenya at the time – I believe five – which admitted around 10,000 entrants annually. It was rooted in the immense respect we held for these institutions of higher learning.

While there were no guarantees of a job after graduation, being a university graduate spoke for itself. By the time your name was read out on graduation day, it was assumed you had been moulded into a pillar of society, a beacon of hope for a better future.

As you stood proudly in your flowing gown and iconic four-cornered hat, you were seen as not just a skilled asset to the economy but a paragon of ethics, patriotism and altruism. When the chancellor – in my time, then-President Daniel arap Moi – conferred the power to read, it was taken for granted that you were equipped to contribute significantly to the country's and world’s advancement.

Of course, with the pressures of a burgeoning population and the need to expand access, more universities emerged. Fiscal challenges, largely attributed to structural adjustment programmes prescribed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, forced universities to seek alternative revenue streams.

This led to the introduction of the Module Two “parallel” programme, which was necessary to accommodate the many who met the entry grade (C+) but couldn’t gain admission under the regular programme, where cut-offs were higher – B (plain) for men and B- (minus) for women during my time.

However, these pressures saw funding for critical areas such as research dwindle to insignificance. Universities later found financial relief in self-sponsored programmes, to the extent that they became key players in the real estate sector. Yet, alarm bells rang louder about the declining quality of education. In short, as universities expanded, fears grew that they had strayed from their core vision.

This is tragic because Kenya is today a citadel of skilled personnel in Africa, thanks to our robust university education system. True, not all Kenyans attended university, but the secondary schools and colleges they went to were most assuredly run by graduates of these institutions.

Now that remittances by Kenyans abroad form a significant part of our national cake, I believe it’s time to give back to our universities. We must ensure they are well-funded to teach, research and innovate for even brighter days ahead. For their part, they must re-imagine themselves as the proverbial person who lives in a glass house and therefore cannot throw stones. Cases of mismanagement are traumatising, especially to the alumni of these institutions whose pride in the world of work is underpinned by the assumed excellence of the institutions they went to.